Most countries treat organised crime episodes as severe aggravation - this is to deter participation in organized crime and avoid "you can't prove who did the actual stabbing" situations
But Mr. Ligon claims he was a bit of a loner and didn't know any of the people that he was with at the time very well. It sounds like "we rounded up a bunch of black people, and we're going to call it a gang". Which I bet was absurdly common. Probably a bit less so now in most places, but certainly the late 20th century had a lot of that sentiment that I can remember, and maybe there is a bit of a resurgence lately in some circles, "tough on crime" and "anti-gang" rhetoric that can be seen as veiled racism.
The article says he was a 15 year old kid (read: underdeveloped prefrontal cortex) out underage drinking, the group asked somebody for money for booze and it escalated into a fight.
This is not saintly behavior but also not worthy of 68 years in prison.
And yeah, it's conceivable that he was out doing this with people he didn't know very well, and that nobody expected or wanted a knife fight to break out.
I think you may be missing something too. You don't see how a non-stabbing fight could escalate into a stabbing fight, even a deadly one, and the participants can have (1) not set out to do it, (2) rather not have done it and (3) not be irredeemable people?
And that some participants were escalating more than others, and it not to have been a "gang" conspiracy?
This is I think what I am complaining about. So eager to see perpetrators as irredeemable villains, rather than possibly at a wrong place at a wrong time, with the wrong company, and/or they just messed up. There's often a racial thing at the root of that too.
Don't get me wrong, the event sounds like a tragedy. But so is spending 68 years in jail for a 15 year old's tragic mistake. And make no mistake, a white person who did the exact same thing or worse would get off easier.
> You don't see how a non-stabbing fight could escalate into a stabbing fight
It wasn't a single incident/moment in time.
Dig a little deeper. These articles don't like to focus on the negative which is why they haven't even named the 2 dead innocent victims(Charles Pitts and Jackson Hamm,):
> Appellant and four others imbibed wine and, over the course of approximately two hours, proceeded to rob and stab eight people, killing Jackson Hamm and Charles Pitts. When Appellant was arrested that night, he was carrying a knife sheath on his person. A knife was
recovered from the patrol car where Appellant had been sitting.
Do you have some additional facts on the case, or are you just regurgitating your preconceived notions?
You seem to be so sure that Mr. Ligon was just a victim drawn into this situation but for all you know he could be a completely cold-hearted killer.
As someone with a friend who was stabbed to death, I personally am glad to live in a society where stabbing people is more gravely punished than a *tragic mistake*.
Under US criminal law, defendants can often be found guilty of murder due to participation in a group criminal activity even if they didn't directly attack the victim. For example, if bank robbers kill a security guard the get-away driver will often be charged with murder even if he never physically entered the bank.
Felony murder? I was on the jury of one case. I kinda felt bad for the defendant - he was 18 and some juvenile in his group pulled the trigger. Probably accidentally.
My guess is that if a pair of robbers hit a liquor store and the liquor store clerk killed one of them, the other can be charged with some form of murder.
How far back…well there is a scripture in the Old Testament that essentially says if you are party to a crime then you are just as guilty as the one who committed the crime…so this common law practice actually dates back at least 4000 years. Also Japanese law held the same types of practices for thousands of years and Is m sure many other ancient cultures.
I think such a grave accusation will bring you to write a story into your permanent memory due to how many times you have to repeat it and go over it. If you go to prison, it’s also the last story of your free life. Once inside, your brain will probably be stuck in a loop over what you could have done differently that could have avoided your current situation.
There's no such thing as a "permanent memory," each time you relive it it's liable to get warped by your thoughts at the moment. Decades of thinking "I must have done something to deserve this" are likely to make the memory of his role in events worse.
That's exactly what happens. See for example the murder of Helen Wilson [1], for which six (!) people were falsely convicted, because they were manipulated into forming false memories.
The guy admitted to murder at the time. His claims otherwise now are both conflicting with other statements he makes now, and conflict with his admissions at the time.
He says himself he has no friends inside or out and that he was better off in prison... Which also means society was better off.
Violent crime was very high in the 80s and 90s, after laws were passed that greatly increased prison sentences for violent criminals in the mid-90s, violent crime has dropped off a cliff. If violent criminals are not out there committing crimes, crime goes down obviously.
> Violent crime was very high in the 80s and 90s, after laws were passed that greatly increased prison sentences for violent criminals in the mid-90s, violent crime has dropped off a cliff.
There were continuous tough on crime efforts throughout (and beyond) the very long “crime wave” period, but there’s very little evidence that they has any impact on turning things around. Better explanations are the demographic bugle aging out of the age range that drives most crime, the lead-crime link, and the legalized abortion crime effect.
He admitted to murdering them. (Which is what a guilty plea fundamentally is.)
Isn't the accused sometimes advised to plead guilty (regardless of the truth of the matter) because he has little chance of winning a plea of innocence? Or is that just in fiction?
>he admits the night ended in a stabbing spree in which he was involved, violence which left two people dead and six injured.
>he has since accepted in an interview with US broadcaster CBS that he stabbed someone who survived
>”I didn't murder anybody."
I wonder if there’s some very simple investigative work that took place, but the article doesn’t mention it, as the author attempts to portray the convicted murder in a way that would foster empathy.
For instance, did the wounds suggest more than one knife was used? If not, that would mean they were handing the knife off to each other. It would be pretty unrealistic that a group of inebriated youngsters could rack up 8 stabbings and 2 murders with 1 knife before the streets were completely cleared and the police were on the scene.
As he’s been convicted, he’s a murderer unless proven otherwise, and deserves his original sentence.
I’m not sure I get your meaning? “Deserve” is a consequence of action, whether it’s a reward or punishment depends on the action. The scope of the consequence is usually clearly defined, and a person or group is empowered with delivering that consequence (reward or punishment). So just as “injustice” exists when someone deserves a reward, (some consequence predicated on their actions), but does not receive it, the same must also exist where someone deserves a punishment but does not receive it.
In a democracy what such an action "deserves" is decided by the people and the people are not of one mind on what a person like this "deserves". It seems quite likely that in a different jurisdiction or at a different time a much lighter sentence would have been imposed for this crime.
Perhaps worth pointing out for general awareness that trial by jury has nothing to do with democracy, per se. Not all democracies do it, and it was (is) a pretty unique thing about the American system of checks and balances at the time it was enshrined in the sixth and seventh Amendments of our Constitution. Jury trials can exist with or without democracy.
To your point about different time and place, yes, but that’s the system: the jury you get, absent a mistrial, is the jury you get and their opinion is what decides what you deserve by definition (absent new evidence, appeals, etc, within the confines of sentencing regulation, etc.).
Perhaps what you’re after is that there’s no universally objective standard of what a person deserves for their actions, given all the myriad influences and conditions that lead to a particular moment in a person’s life, and which may lessen that persons agency. Therefore the judgement of society is imperfect in the sense that it cannot adequately grasp all these attributes, and may give attributes differing weight based on something as small as whether their eggs were over cooked that morning. So for a person to use the word “deserves” with authority is flawed because a person or people cannot render a perfectly objective judgement.
I think you’ll find that this is an argument as old as time, but whether by birth or immigration, people living in a system operate by its rules, and the word “deserve” reflects the authority of a society to bring down punishment on scofflaws. Like when I tell you something is “cold” we need not debate the true principle of what cold means, you assume to context. So should you assume context for the word “deserves”. Society has never achieved perfection in balancing agency and justice but herein lies a predictable truism - if you run around with a band stabbing others so severely that some die and by luck some don’t, society will determine ya dun f’d up.
> Perhaps worth pointing out for general awareness that trial by jury has nothing to do with democracy, per se. Not all democracies do it, and it was (is) a pretty unique thing about the American system of checks and balances at the time it was enshrined in the sixth and seventh Amendments of our Constitution.
It was adopted directly from the British system; Americans had some recent experience with and anger about being subjected to fairly novel (at least in their breadth of application in the colonies) exceptions to the norm of trial by jury and the guarantee reflected a reaction against that experience, but trial by jury wasn’t an American innovation.
Comment you’re replying to never said trial by jury was an American innovation. Simply that it was pretty unique at the time to have that right enshrined in the country’s constitution, and that the right is not a requisite feature of democracies. For instance, the right to a jury trial for serious crimes in England has existed longer than England could seriously call itself a democracy.
> Simply that it was pretty unique at the time to have that right enshrined in the country’s constitution
Having a set, non-nebulous constitution at all, was unique but the claim that trial by jury “ a pretty unique thing about the American system of checks and balances” is false, it was a well-established basic right in the common law system and the deprivation of it in the colonial administration was a fundamental grievance of the American independence movement not because they had some novel ideas about basic right but because they sought it as a deprivation of the rights they saw themselves entitled to in the British common law tradition.
No, you introduced the question of innovation, which was never contained in my statement. Now you are limiting the statement to a comparison with England proper (for they did in fact suppress the right in their colonies), which was also never in my statement, even implicitly. These are called strawmen.
How was France doing with TbJ? How about Japan? China? Russia? Shall we go through the list of countries in the late 18th century to do this by hand? Tally them up and see how many had a guaranteed right to TbJ for criminal offenses by their citizens?
No, the statement I made holds, and you’ll find that by looking at how other countries adjudicated criminal offenses at the time (not just England). Guaranteed TbJ was the exception, not the rule.
I wasn't referring specifically to juries. The ranges of punishments that are prescribed for crimes are done so by democratically elected legislatures in most modern nations, including the US, though judges and juries do have varying degrees of discretion in the matter.
My main point is that in a democracy one shouldn't take the law that exists in a particular place and time as some absolute that cannot be questioned because those laws can and do change through political action, as has recently been happening with drug laws and mandatory sentences for drug crimes.
Murdering multiple people will always be highly unpopular, particularly in the local community where it happens and when it happens, but I take your point.
Would you use the word "deserves" to describe a child hanged for stealing food, which was an expected legal penalty in some times and places? To most people it carries the connotation that the speaker agrees with the appropriateness of the penalty.
For a mentally capable adult, perhaps. We have plenty of research to show that the brains of juveniles are wired differently. That doesn't mean no punishment, but it means that a life sentence is excessive and rehabilitation should be tried.
The overwhelming majority of juveniles do not commit cold-blooded murder like this. Do you believe that this person is not a psychopath? Has any real ground been broken to take violent psychopaths and "cure" their condition? I've seen no evidence of this, and I don't see rehabilitation as anything more than a tool that is useful in certain circumstances.
Most of us on here are in tech rather than psychiatry and not fit to make a call on whether someone is a psycopath, especially from a single article about them that doesn’t really focus on their mental state.
When you think about it, there was enough complex decisions taking place to point towards a developed (albeit devoid of conscience) mind in control.
A childs reasoning would more likely follow this kind of path:
Child wants alcohol->storekeeper has alcohol->child capable of coercion by force (ie stabbing)—>child gets alcohol from storekeeper
However, instead he did this:
Young man wants alcohol->storekeeper has alcohol—>alcohol costs money that young man does not have—>innocent passerby’s have money—> young man capable of coercion by force (ie stabbing)—>young man stabs innocent passerby’s for their money—>Evaluate whether amount stolen is enough for alcohol, if not, repeat previous steps, if so—->young man gets alcohol from storekeeper
Good decisions are not proof of brain development, however complex ones are. Given the evidence I would say he was rightly judged as an adult.
IIRC, empathy isnt fully developed until the early twenties. Even if you are capable of having sophisticated trains of thoughts you might not realize the scope of consequences from your actions.
Life without parole seems like it should be reserved for those who are beyond saving. Not sure a 15 year old boy would classify as such. It all depends on your view of retribution vs rehabilitation though.
He went on a robbing and stabbing spree that ended up with six critical injuries and two deaths.
Maybe you don’t think he deserves his punishment. I certainly do. The type of person who would go on a stabbing spree for wine money is not the kind of person who has any place in society I want to live.
Furthermore, if this is the type of thing that someone has to "learn" not to do at 15, what other horrible things do they still need to learn not to do? It is not worth having these people live around others while they learn these lessons at the cost of innocents around them.
I find that leftist wokes tend to live in their own bubble. They are painfully reminded of it when there is a survey about the death penalty.
Luckily the justice system doesn't operate on the whims of the people like in that story of Jesus' trial.
Not to mention slavery, lynchings, and the consequence-free murder of gender and sexual minorities. There are many things that are today considered barbaric that were once popular, and this is almost certainly a trend that will extend into the future.
lol, I work as a paramedic. How many fatal stabbings have you been to? Especially ones where it was your job to try to save the victims life? Unless your number is higher than mine, save your "woke leftist bubble" argument.
My position is that no 15 year old deserves a life sentence _without parole_. Are there 15 year olds who commit crimes that truly reflect their irredeemable nature? Perhaps. I expect they are in the minority though, and that's the whole point of a parole board (as flawed a system as that is).
I don't think anyone deserves that long for something done at 15. Remember that the potential range of failure (how hard you can fuck up) for a 15 year old is kinda arbitrary as much of it is based on who your parents are.
I'm not saying he doesn't deserve punishment but that seems like a very long amount of time to sentence a minor.
Arguably (though not certainly) a better punishment than death, which would have been a frequent consequence in most of human history for taking the lives of others (plural). Life imprisonment is simply an alternative to the state killing you.
You can die (so we don’t have to worry about your exposure to society) or you can stay in this institution (so we don’t have to worry about you). What do you prefer? ..aaand arguably you can revisit the decision on your own accord later if you choose the latter.
“Time head all wounds” refers to the lessening sense of gravity of experiences over time. This is a function of memory and the healing power of forgetfulness. Life sentences are therefore liable to re-evaluation and pity by their nature, whereas if death was meted out as the sentence, that too would be forgotten in time. I find that interesting, and perhaps it says that we should not trust such emotions in either direction (for or against a punishment) when figuring out how to manage people who systemically murder others.
It’s definitely pretty hard to determine how long someone should be punished for multiple murder. I expect the most capable would be the judge and jury, so it’s hard to improve on that decades later with minimal information.
So life for multiple murder by a 15 year old doesn’t strike up my curiosity for optimizing the sentencing. Unless there’s lots more info. This article didn’t provide any and since the journalist would likely research to make a good article, I expect there’s not any compelling narrative.
>"We started asking people for some money so we could get some more wine and one thing led to another..."
>He trails off. But he admits the night ended in a stabbing spree in which he was involved, violence which left two people dead and six injured.
He goes on to say that although he admits to stabbing someone, the person survived, so he didn't murder anyone.